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EMC lives ILM to the full

Vendor nears strategy completion with system upgrades and platform refresh

Storage giant EMC moved closer to fulfilling its information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy with an upgrade for all of its major product lines.

As revealed last week in CRN, EMC has brought out new models and upgrades for its DMX, Clariion and Celerra ranges, enhancements to the Centera content addressable storage (Cas) system, and extra mainframe functionality.

"This is a departure from where we were a few years ago," said Chuck Hollis, senior vice president of differentiated platforms at EMC. "Instead of trying to be all things to all men, [EMC is] targeting specific needs."

He added that there would be further releases for automating ILM software this year.

But Tony Ruane sales director at storage specialist VAR RedStor, said the ILM software - which he described as the most interesting part - was still weak. System upgrades were needed, he said.

"There is no massive set of revolutionary features. Quite a few of the products needed refreshing anyway and it was an opportunity to clarify the product set. This is evolution rather than revolution," Ruane said.

The high-end Symmetrix DMX range, launched this time last year, has new DMX-2 director switches that double the processor speed to 1GHz, increase global memory up to 256GB and have faster 73GB, 2GBps disks. Existing systems can be upgraded in situ.

Within the Clariion CX NAS range, the CX200, CX400 and CX600 can be field upgraded, or replaced by the CX300, CX500 and CX700, respectively.

The new systems broadly double host connectivity and throughput but cost the same as the older models, which Ruane said made them attractive. EMC's new Flare 13 storage operating environment software can run on all systems, simplifying management using its Navisphere management software.

Among other releases, which are all available immediately, the NS700 is a combined Nas Filer and optional Nas gateway to other storage networks.